Operations management and reengineering

Abstract

Business Process Reengineering has been the most influential management movement of the 1990s, and like the quality movement of the 1980s, it has put management attention squarely on processes and operations. At first glance, however, it is hard to see any relationship between the precepts of Business Process Reengineering and traditional Operations Management teaching. The purpose of this article is two-fold. First, it offers some opinion as to what that relationship is by conceptualizing process design in terms of a design-evaluated iteration: reengineering as represented by the most influential book on the topic, Reengineering the Corporation by Hammer and Champy (1993), concentrates almost exclusively on the design step, whereas traditional Operations Management teaching is heavily oriented toward evaluation, taking a design as given. Second, this article identifies and discusses the process design principle of integrated work enunciated by Hammer and Champy. It is demonstrated how the quantitative benefit of integrated work can be estimated using Operations Management tools, and that the benefit depends on flow control, an important additional process design lever that Hammer and Champy do not address. The article concludes with the observation that as corporations turn away from cost cutting to growth generation, Business Process Reengineering is disappearing from the headlines, but process redesign and improvements can be turned toward performance improvement and revenue generation just as effectively as they have been used for efficiency gains in the past.